Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story

Praise for Into the Woods:

A Five-Act Journey Into Story

Love storytelling? You need this inspiring book. John Yorke dissects the structure of stories with a joyous enthusiasm allied to precise, encyclopedic knowledge. Guaranteed to send you back to your writing desk with newfound excitement and drive.

—Chris Chibnall, creator/writer, Broadchurch and Gracepoint

Outrageously good and by far and away the best book of its kind I’ve ever read. I recognized so much truth in it. But more than that, I learned a great deal. Time and again, Yorke articulates things I’ve always felt but have never been able to describe … This is a love story to story—erudite, witty and full of practical magic. I struggle to think of the writer who wouldn’t benefit from reading it—even if they don’t notice because they’re too busy enjoying every page.

—Neil Cross, creator/writer, Luther and Crossbones

"Part ‘how-to’ manual, part ‘why-to’ celebration, Into the Woods is a wide-reaching and infectiously passionate exploration of storytelling in all its guises … exciting and thought-provoking."

—Emma Frost, screenwriter, The White Queen and Shameless

"John Yorke’s Into the Woods is brilliant. It illuminates and explains."

—Susan Hill, author of The Woman In Black and the Simon Serrailler crime novels

"Even for a convinced sceptic, John Yorke’s book, with its massive field of reference from Aristotle to Glee, and from Shakespeare to Spooks, is a highly persuasive and hugely enjoyable read. It would be hard to beat for information and wisdom about how and why stories are told."

—Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director, the Globe Theatre

‘Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.’

G. K. Chesterton

Copyright

Published in paperback in the United States by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS

195 Broadway, 9th floor

New York, NY 10007

www.overlookpress.com

Originally published in hardcover by The Overlook Press in 2014 and paperback in 2015

Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use.

Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address above.

Copyright © John Yorke, 2013, 2014, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yorke, John.

Into the woods : a five act journey into story / John Yorke.

page cm

ISBN 978-1-4683-0809-9

1. Authorship 2. Creative writing I. Title

PN151.Y58 2014

808’.036--dc23

2014005648

ISBN: 978-1-4683-1094-8

eISBN: 978-1-4683-0958-4

ABRAMS The Art of Books

195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007

abramsbooks.com

Contents

Preface to the paperback edition

There is an awful lot of nonsense written about screenwriting. As soon as you read, There has to be an Inciting Incident on page 23. Not page 20, not page 24. Page 23. Put it there,¹ one should be suspicious. That the command mentions neither page nor font size should be warning enough, but the sheer prescriptiveness of the instruction should make even the credulous recoil. This kind of writing (and teaching in many places) is symptomatic of whole swathes of an industry that in recent years seems to have grown out of control. It needs to stop.

On March 27, 2013, the screenwriting guru John Truby posted an article² that in many ways encapsulated—certainly if one takes into account the comments it generated—all that was good and bad about the study of screenwriting.

With Why 3 Acts Will Kill Your Writing, Truby launched a broadside against the uniformity of teaching, built as most of it was around the three act paradigm first popularized by Syd Field in the 1970s. Truby roundly declared that—

The so-called 3-act structure is the biggest, most destructive myth ever foisted on writers. I would like to call it obsolete. But that implies that it worked in the first place. It didn’t.

Warming to his theme his ire increased—

The 3-act structure exists for one reason and one reason only: a story analyst declared it into existence. He found that something important seemed to happen in some successful scripts on page 27 and on page 87. He called them plot points, said that based on these plot points every screenplay had three acts, and incredibly, everyone bought it . . . Such has been the sad state of screenwriting training and the desperation of screenwriters themselves, that no one noticed that the emperor was in fact naked.

It was a powerful argument. To a new writer trying to make their way in the industry, or to anyone who has read a handful of the books he described, it was immensely attractive. Where there was doubt it offered certainty, where there was intellectual vacuity, it promised clarity.

Truby, then, was on the side of the good guys: those like Russell T. Davies who are infuriated by the spurious instruction so many receive. Davies, the creator Queer as Folk and the mastermind behind the rebirth of Doctor Who, rails—

Wherever I looked, the writing of the script was being reduced to A, B, C, plots, text and subtext. Three Act Structure and blah, blah, blah. And I’d think, that’s not what writing is! Writing’s inside your head! It’s thinking! It’s every hour of the day, every day of your life, a constant storm of pictures and voices and sometimes, if you’re very lucky, insight.

So what did John Truby recommend to replace all this reductive literature?

A 22 point story structure.

To which the only sane response can be: What?

Truby’s post is regularly recycled on social media, and what’s striking about it is the length, volume, and fury on all sides of the comments it provokes. The responses range across all sides—from enthusiastic agreement: I have found that most people who use three-act structure can’t tell me what an act is; to great scepticism: it’s an extreme luxury to allow oneself the authority to dismiss formal craft in screenwriting . . . or painting . . . or ballet . . . There’s displaced anger too: A major reason for the three-act structure being adopted as gospel was not as an aid to writers but as a way of helping the more hopeless brand of development executive; and finally a weary resignation with an argument that never seems to find resolution: "oh sod it . . . just go watch Blue Valentine."

As a debate, it proves inconclusive. As a snapshot of the state of an industry it is far more enlightening. What’s its most important lesson? Film and television are the dominant art form of the twenty-first century, yet there is absolutely no consensus as to what constitutes that art, what the craft skills required to make it are, or how they are taught.

Still—the old mantra goes—you can’t teach writing. But is that true? To answer it let’s look somewhere else for a while—because you can’t teach painting either, can you?

The story of the African-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is instructive. Born in 1960 of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, he rose to fame as a graffiti artist, a talent fermented in the cauldron of the Lower East Side. It was the late 1970s—Manhattan was still accessible without wealth, and in the cross-cultural collision of street art, post-punk, and hip-hop he forged his style. Basquiat was not without talent, but there was a suspicion that his spectacular rise to fame (he graced the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 1985) came as much from his radical politics, his associations (Madonna’s boyfriend, Bowie and Blondie’s Rapture video among others), and the vaguely patronizing suggestion that his background allowed him access to some kind of primitivism. He was cool, in other words. But was he any good?

The late art critic Robert Hughes didn’t think so. In a saner culture than this one, the 20-year-old Basquiat might have gone off to four years of boot camp in art school, he thundered. There he might have learned some real drawing abilities (as distinct from the pseudo-convulsive notation that was his trademark), and in general, acquired some of the disciplines and skills without which good art cannot be made.

Hughes’s attack—not so much on Basquiat but of the culture that surrounded him—was part of a wider onslaught: For nearly a quarter century, late-modernist art teaching (especially in America) has increasingly succumbed to the fiction that the values of the so-called academy—meaning, in essence, the transmission of disciplined skills based on drawing from the live model and the natural motif—were hostile to ‘creativity.’³

Hughes was not some crusty old warrior bemoaning the ways of a younger generation. He was a champion of modern art, and his book, The Shock of the New, remains the definitive work on the subject nearly forty years after publication. But he was angry, because he felt that art was a skill that required disciplined training. Hughes loathed the juvenile belief that art just happened—that it came solely from the wellspring of genius, and he argued furiously that while the study of line drawing may not have been fashionable, it underpinned the work of every titan of the art world from Picasso and Mondrian to de Kooning. Without those craft skills there was nothing to value in a work—its appeal relied entirely on the vagaries of fashion. And fashion, as Basquiat was to find out, was transient. A tragic death from heroin at 27 ironically stopped him from completely disappearing; that, and the pyramid scheme that underpins modern art means that there is still a market for his work, but the tragedy Hughes believed, lay not only in his death, but in what he could have been had he been nurtured properly.

In other words—you can teach painting—you can create an environment where disciplined application and rigorous thought will, over time, give birth to great talent; and you can do the same thing with writing too. To do so however, requires an absolute understanding and mastery of the craft skills required. This is where screenwriting hits a problem; because as Truby’s post—and the comments they inspired, underlined—there’s absolutely no consensus as to what those skills are.

It’s infuriating, because there should be, and because the rules are deceptively simple. Or at least the true rules are. The real rules are the rules of drama, the rules that Aristotle talks about, said Aaron Sorkin—who knows more than most about dramatic structure. Aristotle posited that stories should have a beginning, middle and end—that a position should be stated, explored and a conclusion reached. It’s a structure as old as time; used lovingly by Sorkin and all those who went before him—it’s three acts: it’s position stated, explored, conclusion reached—dramatized. Sorkin himself proved on occasion that you can break these rules, just as Schoenberg, Ayler, Picasso, and Mondrian were to do—but all knew exactly what rules they were transcending. They understood that the rules helped.

This however poses one absolutely key question: How can you tell the real rules from the fake ones? It’s not easy, but it’s essential, because it’s in that territory—that lawless frontier—where so much snake oil is sold.

When I first started researching Into the Woods I was baffled about how much was written about film narrative, but how little there was on literature. It seemed axiomatic that the rules of narrative had to be the same across both forms (otherwise they couldn’t be rules), yet in academic circles the whole idea that you could analyze narrative structure was—is—seen as little more than a quirk. Outside of the Russian Formalists and a few brave English professors (notably A.C. Bradley, Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1901 to 1906), it simply wasn’t something taken seriously. I asked one esteemed English professor from a reputable University what he thought of Robert McKee. He looked at me blankly. Who?

It was a shocking moment. The entire industry of screenwriting gurus—the very system John Truby attacks yet contributes to—has no purchase in academic circles at all. And for that, there’s a simple reason.

You will not be taken seriously in an academic environment if your work only asks How? How gives you a globe perched on the shoulders of Atlas, a sun that goes round the earth, a flat planet, racial superiority and the belief that smoking is good for you. External observation only ever reveals the prejudices of a time. It’s a basic tenet of any formal rigorous approach that all inquiry must examine cause. It must ask Why?

So Into the Woods began as an attempt to answer a question very few had bothered to ask—why does structure exist, and why is it the shape it is? It was born out of a frustration with existing screen-writing literature; at the lack of any discernible underlying logic. It was not just a pious concern. My job as a television executive meant I could see at first-hand how many new writers, ill-equipped to deal with the high-pressure demands upon them, were being destroyed by an industry that faced with high overheads and time-poor, simply had no time to correct failure and nurture talent. It’s a toxic combination: desperate for any clue as to how to survive in a ruthless industry writers were—are—vulnerable to the most dangerous drug of all—false hope and false instruction.

So as we now head toward its paperback publication it’s worth making one point clear. This book won’t make you a better writer. No one book will. But as part of something bigger—the steady, solid, consistent thrum of practice; the belief that study and application are important; and perhaps above all the understanding that if a writer’s job is to explore truth, then the least they can do is first seek it out in their craft. Picasso found, as Mondrian found, that knowledge should not to be feared. The empirical investigation of a craft should be embraced; the Why? given at least equal emphasis to the How? Knowledge should be guarded and policed, and shamans run from the building.

The British screenwriter Alan Plater once boasted that the proudest moment of his illustrious career was punching Syd Field in the face.⁴ Part braggadocio, part insecurity (and there’s no evidence he actually did), Plater railed against the teaching of structure, unaware that he wrote perfect structure himself. But he was terrified of writing according to a template; terrified of writing by rote. It would be churlish to say that all screenwriting books are bad, as he was often wont to proclaim;⁵ clearly there are many that offer help and enlightenment—but Plater’s concern, that following a recipe would diminish his work, is a valid one to which attention should be paid. But following a shape and understanding why it exists are two different things.

John Truby says three act structure is terrible.

He states his position.

He explores it.

He reaches a conclusion.

John Truby writes in three acts.

Introduction

A ship lands on an alien shore and a young man, desperate to prove himself, is tasked with befriending the inhabitants and extracting their secrets. Enchanted by their way of life, he falls in love with a local girl and starts to distrust his masters. Discovering their man has gone native, they in turn resolve to destroy both him and the native population once and for all.

Avatar or Pocahontas? As stories they’re almost identical. Some have even accused James Cameron of stealing the Native American myth.¹ But it’s both simpler and more complex than that, for the underlying structure is common not only to these two tales, but to all.

Take three different stories:

A dangerous monster threatens a community. One man takes it on himself to kill the beast and restore happiness to the kingdom …

It’s the story of Jaws, released in 1976. But it’s also the story of Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem published some time between the eighth and eleventh centuries.

And it’s more familiar than that: it’s The Thing, it’s Jurassic Park, it’s Godzilla, it’s The Blob – all films with real tangible monsters. If you recast the monsters in human form, it’s also every James Bond film, every episode of MI5, House or CSI. You can see the same shape in The Exorcist, The Shining, Fatal Attraction, Scream, Psycho and Saw. The monster may change from a literal one in Nightmare on Elm Street to a corporation in Erin Brockovich, but the underlying architecture – in which a foe is vanquished and order restored to a community – stays the same. The monster can be fire in The Towering Inferno, an upturned boat in The Poseidon Adventure, or a boy’s mother in Ordinary People. Though superficially dissimilar, the skeletons of each are identical.

Our hero stumbles into a brave new world. At first he is transfixed by its splendour and glamour, but slowly things become more sinister …

It’s Alice in Wonderland, but it’s also The Wizard of Oz, Life on Mars and Gulliver’s Travels. And if you replace fantastical worlds with worlds that appear fantastical merely to the protagonists, then quickly you see how Brideshead Revisited, Rebecca, The Line of Beauty and The Third Man all fit the pattern too.

When a community finds itself in peril and learns the solution lies in finding and retrieving an elixir far, far away, a member of the tribe takes it on themselves to undergo the perilous journey into the unknown …

It’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Morte D’Arthur, Lord of the Rings and Watership Down. And if you transplant it from fantasy into something a little more earthbound, it’s Master and Commander, Saving Private Ryan, Guns of Navarone and Apocalypse Now. If you then change the object of the characters’ quest, you find Rififi, The Usual Suspects, Ocean’s Eleven, Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise.

So three different tales turn out to have multiple derivatives. Does that mean that when you boil it down there are only three different types of story? No. Beowulf, Alien and Jaws are ‘monster’ stories – but they’re also about individuals plunged into a new and terrifying world. In classic ‘quest’ stories like Apocalypse Now or Finding Nemo the protagonists encounter both monsters and strange new worlds. Even ‘Brave New World’ stories such as Gulliver’s Travels, Witness and Legally Blonde fit all three definitions: the characters all have some kind of quest, and all have their own monsters to vanquish too. Though they are superficially different, they all share the same framework and the same story engine: all plunge their characters into a strange new world; all involve a quest to find a way out of it; and in whatever form they choose to take, in every story ‘monsters’ are vanquished. All, at some level, too, have as their goal safety, security, completion and the importance of home.

But these tenets don’t just appear in films, novels, or indeed TV series like Homeland or The Killing. A nine-year-old child of my friend decided he wanted to tell a story. He didn’t consult anyone about it, he just wrote it down:

A family are looking forward to going on holiday. Mom has to sacrifice the holiday in order to pay the rent. Kids find map buried in garden to treasure hidden in the woods, and decide to go after it. They get in loads of trouble and are chased before they finally find it and go on even better holiday.²

Why would a child unconsciously echo a story form that harks back centuries? Why, when writing so spontaneously, would he display knowledge of story structure that echoes so clearly generations of tales that have gone before? Why do we all continue to draw our stories from the very same well? It could be because each successive generation copies from the last, thus allowing a series of conventions to become established. But while that may help explain the ubiquity of the pattern, its sturdy resistance to iconoclasm and the freshness and joy with which it continues to reinvent itself suggest something else is going on.

Storytelling has a shape. It dominates the way all stories are told and can be traced back not just to the Renaissance, but to the very beginnings of the recorded word. It’s a structure that we absorb avidly whether in art-house or airport form and it’s a shape that may be – though we must be careful – a universal archetype.

‘Most writing on art is by people who are not artists: thus all the misconceptions.’

Eugène Delacroix

The quest to detect a universal story structure is not a new one. From the Prague School and the Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century, via Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism to Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, many have set themselves the task of trying to understand how stories work. In my own field it’s a veritable industry – there are hundreds of books about screenwriting (though almost nothing sensible about television). I’ve read most of them, but the more I read the more two issues nag away:

Most of them posit completely different systems, all of which claim to be the sole and only way to write stories. How can they all possibly claim to be right?

None of them asks ‘Why?’³

Some of these tomes contain invaluable information; more than a few have worthwhile insights; all of them are keen to tell us how and with great fervour insist that ‘there must be an inciting incident on page 12’, but none of them explains why this should be. Which, when you think about it, is crazy: if you can’t answer ‘why’, the ‘how’ is an edifice built on sand. And then, once you attempt to answer it yourself, you start to realize that much of the theory – incisive though some of it is – doesn’t quite add up. Did God decree an inciting incident should occur on page 12, or that there were twelve stages to a hero’s journey? Of course not: they’re constructs. Unless we can find a coherent reason why these shapes exist, then there’s little reason to take these people seriously. They’re snake-oil salesmen, peddling their wares on the frontier.⁴

I’ve been telling stories for almost all my adult life, and I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of working on some of the most popular shows on British television. I’ve created storylines that have reached over 20 million viewers and I’ve been intimately involved with programmes that helped redefine the dramatic landscape. I’ve worked, almost uniquely in the industry, on both art-house and populist mainstream programs, loved both equally, and the more I’ve told stories, the more I’ve realized that the underlying pattern of these plots – the ways in which an audience demands certain things – has an extraordinary uniformity.

Eight years ago I started to read everything on storytelling. More importantly I started to interrogate all the writers I’d worked with about how they write. Some embraced the conventions of three-act structure, some refuted it – and some refuted it while not realizing they used it anyway. A few writers swore by four acts, some by five; others claimed that there were no such things as acts at all. Some had conscientiously learned from screenwriting manuals while others decried structural theory as the devil’s spawn. But there was one unifying factor in every good script I read, whether authored by brand new talent or multiple award-winners, and that was that they all shared the same underlying structural traits.

By asking two simple questions – what were these traits; and why did they recur – I unlocked a cupboard crammed full of history. I soon discovered that the three-act paradigm was not an invention of the modern age but an articulation of something much more primal; that modern act structure was a reaction to dwindling audience attention spans and the invention of the curtain. Perhaps more intriguingly, the history of five-act drama took me back to the Romans, via the nineteenth-century French dramatist Eugène Scribe and German novelist Gustav Freytag to Molière, Shakespeare and Jonson. I began to understand that, if there really was an archetype, it had to apply not just to screenwriting, but to all narrative structures. One either tells all stories according to a pattern or none at all. If storytelling does have a universal shape, this has to be self-evident.

It was an investigation that was to produce a number of interesting offshoots. By concentrating initially on film and television, I was able to:

explore how story structure works, not just in single-protagonist storytelling but also in multi-protagonist dramas

explain why protagonists have to be active

illustrate how – in more detail than ever before – the structural principles work in television

understand how narration can destroy drama

expound on why so many characters die in the penultimate stage of any drama

explain why almost all cops are mavericks

elucidate why TV drama series all have a limited lifespan, or else become parodies of themselves – normally within three years

illustrate how characterization is not only born out of dramatic structure but is essential to it.

These were, however, discoveries that started to appear incidental to something more important. What started as a basic exploration of screenwriting morphed slowly into a historical, philosophical, scientific and psychological journey to the heart of all storytelling, and – in turn – to the realization that dramatic structure is not a construct, but a product of human psychology, biology and physics.

In Into the Woods I attempt to explore and unfold the extraordinary beauty of this structure; to touch on its historical development, and to understand how and why it is manifest in all aspects of fiction, from character to dialogue, but beyond that too. I may use films primarily as a reference because of their familiarity, but the scope of the book stretches beyond cinema, not just to television drama and its relationship to The Apprentice and The X Factor but further, to touch on how we narrate history, how we interpret art and advertising – even how, in a legal trial, we form our opinions on a subject’s innocence or guilt. Why were the Central Park Five originally thought to be guilty and convicted for a crime they didn’t commit? It all has to do with story: why did The Voice sweep away all before it? How does some modern art exploit its patrons’ gullibility? All in the end are products of narrative.

It’s been a journey that – finally – let me articulate not only an underlying structure from which these stories are formed but, more importantly, allowed me to explain why that shape exists, and why anyone, without study, can replicate it entirely from within. How can a nine-year-old boy produce a perfect story from nowhere? It’s a key question: understand that and you unlock the true shape and purpose of, indeed the true reason for, dramatic structure itself. It’s a question, certainly, that no teacher of screenwriting ever appears to ask.

But do you need to know?

You have to liberate people from [film theory], not give them a corset in which they have to fit their story, their life, their emotions, the way they feel about the world. Our curse is that the film industry is 80 per cent run by the half-informed. You have people who have read Joseph Campbell and Robert McKee, and